The K/E Response to Bush's Flip-Flop on Iraq.

The Kerry/Edwards campaign's response to the new justifications for invading Iraq need to incorporate at least two components, and I'm not sure the K/E campaign's doing it as effectively as it could. See below.

First, Condi's rationale Sunday morning needs to be publicly repudiated. On Fox, she said:

Saddam was "a major and growing threat to the international community" with "an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction," Rice said.

"It was time to take care of him. And this president, post-September 11th, was not going to let threats continue to gather," she added. "It was only a matter of time."

Bullshit. Mike Allen and Dana Priest at the Post debunked Condi's claim four days ago. The openning paragraph reads:

The government's most definitive account of Iraq's arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Sorry, Ms. Rice, but it wasn't "a matter of time." You still haven't learned how to listen to your intelligence reports.

Second, the K/E campaign needs to put Kerry's statement from last week at the forefront of all their statements about the White House's rationale for invading Iraq: namely, "You can't go to war and make up reasons after the fact." That's crisp, clear, and gets right to the heart of the matter. (It also implies that the President's trying to flip-flop on this issue without his hearers knowing it, which might help refocus the anti-Kerry flip-flop meme into a question about "the President's problem with telling the American people the truth").

To be fair, Edwards tried to raise the issue this morning.

"You know, the Bush administration's explanation is: 'We invaded a country because at some point in the future they might get weapons of mass destruction?' ... I mean, the bottom line is, this is a convoluted logic to try to justify in hindsight what we now know wasn't true," Edwards said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Edwards's language is just, well, too convoluted; he should stick to Kerry's aforementioned crisp formula and he should say it decisively before he says anything else.